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Speech Analytics 101: And why it’s ‘A Pressing Need’ for Every Contact Center

AI Speech Analytics solutions are rapidly becoming a quintessential part of every contact center. If you have any intentions of keeping up with or overtaking your competition in the areas of:

  • Customer Experience (CX)

  • Compliance

  • Operational Efficiency

  • Fine-Tuning Your Agents’ Performance

You’re going to want to understand – what a fully integrated speech analytics contact center is; and why it’s a pressing need.

Speech Analytics 101

At its core, your contact center is an avenue to converse with customers; offer your products/services and/or improve their experience with the one you've provided. Becoming better at what you do should highlight the fact that there’s always room for improvement. Figuring out and gathering the appropriate knowledge, data or intelligence is a science the right speech analytics software will provide for you, in actionable form.


1. What is Speech Analytics?

Speech Analytics is the process of analyzing and extracting data in different forms, from a voice recording. With an AI-based speech analytics tool, you can augment your contact center to benefit from real-time speech analytics, as well as post-call, chat, email, and social media mentions.

What is Speech Analytics

Traditionally, you would fill this role with a Quality Assurance Analyst (QAA). To, not only analyze what was said during a call but also:

  • Notice emerging trends in customer interactions

  • Training and coaching of agents

  • Improving contact center efficiency… amongst other things

But as the dawn of AI floods over the horizon of the Tech sector, it brings with it – autonomy, accuracy, and more efficient ways of carrying our workload in greater capacities than we previously had been. The point is, running a speech analytics contact center will be more pivotal and prudent for you, in fulfilling your business’ objectives.

As it is, only 1-3% of calls are reviewed by analysts. Some of the larger organization’s analysts don’t even get to review up to 1% of calls. These Quality Assessment teams then go on to make decisions without seeing the whole picture. It’s almost like taking a test on a book you’ve only read 3% of. If that were to happen, do you think you’d get the best results?


2. How Do Speech Analytics Work?

Speech analytics software is brought to life by making use of a variety of technologies. Including Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and predetermined algorithms, based on your current quality assessment (QA) evaluation process.

There are currently three major ways for a speech analytics tool to provide feedback and solution with each call:

  • Speech-to-text – is used in the event of a post-call analysis, by transcribing all recorded words to text

  • Direct phrase recognition – is used for real-time speech analytics, by analyzing the conversation for pre-defined phrases

  • Phonetic – Through NLP, your speech analytics software can detect the emotion and sentiment of the customer calling, likewise the agent’s too

A combination of one or all the methods utilized by your speech analytics solution will result in actionable data, to improve your proficiency metrics.

How Do Speech Analytics Work

3. How to Use Speech Analytics

There are several ways to take advantage of speech analytics once it's up and running in your contact center. Your QA team will work with your speech analytics software provider, to build a matrix. A sort of advanced score card with your organization's key performance indicators (KPIs); with which to rate and aid in every call.


Within this matrix will also be cues that have been programmed to aid your agents in staying on a scripted route, as some agents struggle with the knowledge base, and thus tend to offer multiple periods of silence while they try to recollect or seek help in this regard. And in this business, silence can be a costly period of time, as it increases the average handling time (AHT).


This also helps to define a more uniform experience throughout your contact center. And it increases the likelihood of reaching a first-call resolution (FCR) regularly. Anytime a customer calls with a complaint or inquiry not solved the first time, it doubles the work of your contact center as an agent will have to attend to them again when they could've been speaking with a new caller.


Compliance is a big deal in this day and age. Your speech analytics call center may be located in Europe, where keeping in line with the GDPR has become a must in recent years. Even in the event of not being located in Europe, just having customers that reside there means conducting business under those rules...


Your organization may fall within the Banking or Health sector, which has a long list of dos and don’ts while interacting with and providing services for customers.


In any case, once you’ve integrated AI speech analytics for call centers into your framework, it becomes the all-seeing-ear (so to speak) with every phone call and keeps your agents on compliant tracks.

The feedback loop for your agents becomes instant. Rather than waiting a week or two for customers to fill out surveys and it travels through the pipeline to the right personnel, who then reviews it and coaches the agent accordingly; at which point the dynamics of current customer/agent interactions may no longer be the same. Your speech analytics tool 100% of the time will relay instant feedback.


Having been programmed with the relevant phrase library, taking note of customer sentiment and your organization's KPIs, the AI software will convey to the agent in real-time where there's room for improvement. This is one of the key benefits of speech analytics, as it greatly nurtures an environment for a better CX and goes a long way to reducing customer churn.


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